September 26, 2018

McArdle says she was ready to write "It's now clear that Brett Kavanaugh's nomination cannot go forward" if another sexual assault allegation came out, but she changed her mind when she saw that New Yorker article about Deborah Ramirez. McArdle had thought that "a second allegation would be stronger, not weaker, than the first." She's "frankly surprised the New Yorker ran the article."

And so I'm writing a different column than I expected, about something I hadn't fully understood until I watched that seismic shift [toward expediting the process lest after nominee would go down to a string of unverifiable allegations]: the extent to which the success of #MeToo depends on the credibility of the journalists who report on it.

We hear the slogan "believe women" a lot, but even its strongest media proponents can't really mean it literally, because journalists know how often people tell them things that aren't true....

As #MeToo has grown, mainstream media outlets have generally been scrupulous about getting that confirmation before they publish. It's hard to overstate the dangers when that filter fails. When Rolling Stone failed to check allegations about gang rape at the University of Virginia, the magazine both smeared innocent young men and caused other victims to be treated more skeptically. And when a weak story breaks into an already raging political conflagration, it not only creates skepticism under which future abusers can shelter but also threatens to turn #MeToo into yet another divide in the culture wars.

In the #MeToo movement, it has seemed that multiple accusations have been crucial in taking down prominent men. And now here is a prominent man who began as the target of a desired takedown. The first accusation inspired credulity because of the built-up strength of the believe-all-survivors ethic, but the second one felt so weak that it not only failed to strengthen the attack, it roused suspicion about the first accusation.

If only the authorities would do their work, then we could rely on them, McArdle seems to say. They've been "generally... scrupulous" in the past. Oh? Somehow I rankle at that idealized image. And I resist the complacency about professionalized journalism and its alliance with a political movement. It's up to us, the citizenry, to maintain our vigilance. No shortcuts. You can't "believe all women" or trust the "mainstream" press. Pay attention and sharpen up, or we are lost.

NOTE: This is the fifth in a series of posts about Kavanaugh this morning. Comments on this post should only be about this article. Here's my post warning you that a series of posts is forthcoming. If you want to draw attention to other articles, do so in the comments section for that post, not this one.

311 comments:

The press suffers from credibility when they ignore things like Ellison's woes. And boy do they ignore them. No one asks Hillary about Sexual Harrassment except in the most bland of terms. And now we have Kavanausea and everyone is sick of the Media.

There are efforts to keep the #MeToo movement from decending into brainless misandry, but there seems to be this gravitational pull towards rage filled gender grievence vengence seeking to redress historical sins of males regardless of actual guilt. Righteous anger and revenge feel so good.

The authenticity of the documents was challenged within hours on Internet forums and blogs, with questions initially focused on alleged anachronisms in the documents' typography. Content soon spread to the mass media.[11] Although CBS and Rather defended the authenticity and usage of the documents for a two-week period, continued scrutiny from other news organizations and independent analysis of the documents obtained by USA Today and CBS raised questions about their validity and led to a public repudiation on September 20, 2004.

"I witnessed Mark Judge and Brett Kavanaugh drink excessively and engage in highly inappropriate conduct, including being overly aggressive with girls and not taking 'No' for an answer. This conduct included the fondling and grabbing of girls without their consent," Swetnick writes.

"I also witnessed efforts by Mark Judge, Brett Kavanaugh and others to cause girls to become inebriated and disoriented so they could then be 'gang raped' in a side room or bedroom by a 'train' of numerous boys ... These boys included Mark Judge and Brett Kavanaugh ... In approximately 1982, I became the victim of one of these 'gang' or 'train' rapes where Mark Judge and Brett Kavanaugh were present," she added.

She said she was drugged during the gang rape of which she was a victim, but has "a firm recollection of seeing boys lined up outside rooms at many of these parties waiting for their 'turn' with a girl inside the room."

The credulous part is that the believe the women only applies to Republicans. Were they going after Ellison, Booker, Biden, Menendez, and not telling men to just shut up, I'd be willing to consider the accusations more than as a shallow political ploy.

After the railroading of (R) law makers to clear the way for progressives (Delay, Stephens), and abuse of sealed records (Bush, Ryan from Chicago), I frankly don't think convictions, much less accusations are actionable.

Sad, but at this point, it is better that guilty get away with it than this kind of thing be permitted to repeat.

Well, if only the authorities would do their work, we could rely on them. WAIT! STOP RIGHT THERE!

Apparently, the FBI is the most incompetent background checker of all time, because they apparently missed Brett Kavanaugh's weekend gig as a "partier" extraordinaire. And as we speak, that genius seeker of truth Bob Avenati has trolled up some fifth-tier federal employee who says Kavanaugh and Judge ran a gang rape racket when they were 16. How did they miss that in the six background checks? I am sure many senators will want to know more.

I don't believe any of this, and you shouldn't either. Soon Kavanagh will be identified as Uncle Brett in the McMartin Preschool case (I think I read that in another comment thread). In Salem he would be flying invisibly around the meeting house to torment the poor bewitched girls.

They're coming fast and furious now. Look for the "witness list" to grow.

The latest is Julie Swetnick. From her official declaration today:

I currently hold the following active clearances associated with working within the federal government: Public Trust-U.S. Department of Treasury (DOT), U.S. Mint (USM), Internal Revenue Service (IRS)

I have previously held the following inactive clearances: Secret-U.S. Department of State (DOS), U/S/ Department of Justice (DOJ)and Public Trust-U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Customs and Border Protection (CBP)

Well, that should be obvious. Once the rabble figure out that the cause cannot be trusted, they stop trusting. After that, the only hope is to intimidate the rabble, at which point the cause may have power but no longer have any credibility. Unless MeToo is planning on a coup, they are not going to get anywhere making random and weak accusations. Even if they do make a coup such things tend to end badly. Coups work when the new leaders are good at their jobs and "desperation to hold onto power" coups do not tend to provide as such.

So this newest woman....watched a number of her friends/peers get raped and did nothing to stop it...was raped herself and did/said nothing...kept going to these parties even though she knew there would be more rapes/sexual assaults...then 35 years later...waited until all the confirmation hearings were over....and THEN said something?

We should immediately start several multi-pronged investigations into how many dicks Sotomayor, Kagan and Ginsberg sucked in college and how many abortions they had, if any. Maybe, they got into an argument with a boyfriend, and slapped him, and we can root out this "domestic violence"

1. Get all their high school year books.2. Get all their college year books3. Get all the alumni lists for each of their schools4. Get the WSJ and Foxnews to hire teams of reporters to talk to all their classmates.5. Find the handful of college/high school Republicans who don't like these women6. Find ex-boyfriends 7. Investigate illegal abortion clinics used in NYC in the 50s, 60s, 70s by elite families.8. Write lots of stories about stuff you find. Nail some of the sluttier friends of these 3 women.

This sounds totally vicious and crazy, doesn't it?

But this is what they are doing to Kavanaugh, under the guise of #metoo.

Sink Kavanaugh at any cost is the name of the Democrat game.

At least with Bork, these sonsabitches stuck to his published opinions and judicial philosophy.

I am serious.If drunken (and drug use) gang rape parties were happening - week after week..."every weekend" why would these girls let themselves and their friends get drugged and gang rapped... and it starts all over next weekend?

Also, the "new" statements via Avenatti do not claim he raped anyone. It is careful, lawyerly weasel wording, to whit “I saw a line of boys...that included...” and “I became a victim...and he was present” at the party.

They purposely avoided directly accusing him, and simply smeared him by association.

Mayer & Farrow are going to win awards for their reporting. They're going down in journalistic history. Aside from other stories, they took down Eric Schneiderman. Was that partisan?

The Federalist society has a LOT to answer for about their vetting. Past nominees have removed themselves for smoking pot once. Background should have been more thoroughly vetted.

Should a hard undergraduate partier be disqualified from SCOTUS when the drinking age was 21? I dunno. But sure think they should have been aware of it before putting his name forward. How did the vetters not know about Mark Judge's book w/ a Burt Kavanaugh character in it?

The original goal was not to get K. on the court. The original goal was a conservative jurist on SCOTUS.

Multiple gang rapes by 16 year old boys on 15 year old girls in a nice neighborhood using drugs on the girls? That sort of thing is difficult to keep under wraps for 36 minutes, much less 36 years.

The Democrats have gone all in. They intend to to ride this line of attack until Cavanaugh withdraws. I say "bring it on". The Democrat attack is beginning to look like a political Battle of the Bulge.

A few days ago McArdle wrote that Kavanaugh should be treated as an individual, not as a proxy for whatever group of people whose collective ass we want to fix. It's the flip side of OJ's criminal trial, where he became a proxy for all the Blacks who had been treated unjustly.

Another woman now claims that she, too, was gang raped multiple times while Kavanaugh was in the same city as her, and yet another woman is reporting that Kavanaugh shot her dead on at least four separate occasions!

I hate all of this but the Julie Swetnick stuff is going to be fascinating. I am not sure if women appreciate this, but the vast majority of American men from this socio-economic stratum are simply incapable of behaving in the manner described. That is why so many of us believed so quickly that the Duke LaCrosse/U of V story were horseshit. Men that are capable of this type of behavior typically end up in prison or homeless or dead; they don't make it into good schools and become prominent citizens. Are there exceptions - sure, look at the crazy surgeon in California or some of the educated serial killers -- but in those cases the guys act out their perversions in secret, not in front of a bunch of others. This is Duke LaCrosse and Rolling Stone. Avenatti is a f-ing idiot for believing this woman. But I remember all of the educated women who believed the Duke LaCrosse and Jackie crap without an ounce of skepticism and I do not have any hope that this time will be different. It will probably be much worse since so much harder to disprove.

The first accusation inspired [in]credulity. Fixed that for you. I found the first accusation ludicrous on its face, that you take it seriously is personal to you and some others, but certainly not everyone saw it so.

It was required reading in junior HS. Unfortunately that was more than 50 years ago and my memory is vague. One thing I recall is that multiple witnesses saw the protagonist communicating with the Devil.

I think I did it all as a young man, but I never attended a party at which there was a gang rape, and I never HEARD of a single such party. Did any of you here? The idea of routine gang rape parties seems preposterous on the face of it, even for Catholics.

MRC study found only 8% of the news coverage of the Kavanaugh travesty has been about his denials and the evidence contradicting the so-called victims. 8%! There is no issue about the credibility of the journolistas. They have none. They are just “Democrats with bylines.” (via Instapundit)

Welcome to hearsay America courtesy of the women of the #metoo movement and their fawning mediaswine busy trivializing the trauma and suffering of genuine victims of sexual assault .

If drunken (and drug use) gang rape parties were happening - week after week..."every weekend" why would these girls let themselves and their friends get drugged and gang rapped... and it starts all over next weekend?

Juliet of the Spirits is claiming that there were many house parties all across Montgomery County where Kavanaugh and Judge were preying on girls. I am from the area and there was no way for these two groups of kids to find out about each others' "private house parties" on any large scale.

This is a large county poorly served by bus and subway lines even now. At the time the subway didn't run to Gaithersburg which is quite a distance from Bethesda where Georgetown Prep is located and on a different bus line. The private schools were in their own sports league, different from the up county high schools. Most of these high school students didn't have their own cars, especially up county where they had to earn the money for them. None of them had cell phones, obviously, and no Facebook, again obviously. Gaithersburg and Bethesda had different country clubs. In short, there was no way for these two groups of kids to find out about each others' "private house parties."

It is impossible to believe that an unchecked culture of gang rape and drinking was going on between the Preppies and the up-county teens or even between Bethesda and Gaithersburg teens.

I think I did it all as a young man, but I never attended a party at which there was a gang rape, and I never HEARD of a single such party. Did any of you here? The idea of routine gang rape parties seems preposterous on the face of it, even for Catholics.

If my male friends and I had ever heard of such a thing, we would have kicked asses of the guys responsible. Severely. The girls we went to school with were our friends.

Not really. MeToo was largely an internal left wing realignment. Standards of professionalism were already incorporated into right leaning institutions. Openly left institutions rejected those standards because the embrace of sexuality bolstered their characterization of the right as prudish and the need to support the Clintons prevented much pushback. The right-most effected men of MeToo were still in a left wing dominated culture (media - the Fox News crew).

I don’t think most Americans see this as an issue of credibility among politicians, let alone journalists.

I think most Americans don’t trust either group, with good reason, and drawing attention to some journalistic meta-narrative now just sounds like more narcissism, more beltway myopia, and more tone-deaf elitism.

Most Americans, fairly or unfairly, see this as a battle of super-elite against super-elite.

The only way to change the narrative is to change the nominee. Then go full Sicilian on your enemies. Politics sucks.

I have thought for the last couple of weeks that this will be the rock upon which #MeToo founders. People of good will were on board with the goals of #MeToo, but the movement is burning its credibility and political capital with these blatantly ridiculous accusations.

This is Duke LaCrosse and Rolling Stone. Avenatti is a f-ing idiot for believing this woman. But I remember all of the educated women who believed the Duke LaCrosse and Jackie crap without an ounce of skepticism and I do not have any hope that this time will be different. It will probably be much worse since so much harder to disprove.

Yes. She is probably one of those people that Veritas tapes saying they do all their work for DSA while the taxpayers pay their salaries.

I think Avenatti just lost the Democrats the midterms. He just proved Anton completely right about the Flight 93 election. If they're going to UVA rape case an entirely pedestrian conservative jurist, no conservative should feel confident he or she will be granted any semblance of dignity in the brave new progressive world.

I still think there is a 50-50 chance to get Kavanaugh confirmed and the GOP to retain the Senate. Perhaps, I am wildly optimistic.

One mistake that Grassley has to fix is something akin to what lawyers say is the discovery deadline. You say something like the door closes for statements, claims, evidence, 1 week BEFORE his testimony, so that you don't have all these late hits in the media AFTER his testimony.

If given enough time, the Dems and the media could stitch together a negative dossier against Mother Theresa. She also happens to be Pro-Life -- that bitch!

gahrie said..."If my male friends and I had ever heard of such a thing, we would have kicked asses of the guys responsible. Severely. The girls we went to school with were our friends."Agree 100%. Even in my high school, which was probably 5-10 times larger BK's, we all knew who was sleeping with whom. No way news of something like this would not spread and no way that the perps would have survived the first such event.

Swetnick says she attended "well over ten" parties where Kavanaugh was present and saw him "drink excessively at many of these parties and engage in abusive and physically aggressive behavior towards girls, including pressing girls against him without their consent, 'grinding' against girls and attempting to remove or shift girls' clothing to expose private body parts. "Swetnick made her allegations in a sworn statement that was given to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Her statement includes a series of other serious allegations that CNN has not yet been able to corroborate.

In what way did they corroborate the allegations that they did report? For some reason they left that out. They also left out the preposterous claims, so that the plausible ones might have a chance to stick.

It's interesting that McArdle reports "a seismic shift" among Republicans when the second story came and proved weak. Evidently Republicans, at any rate, have finally realized that the Dems will lie and will go after any Republican with any story if said Republican seems to be achieving power. The shift was so strong that McArdle had to write on the media keeping its credibility instead of Kavanaugh keeping his. This shift isn't being reported in the Pravda media but it exists and it has many implications - for #MeToo and also perhaps for the elections. If 2016 was the Flight 93 election, perhaps the 2018 elections will be the Miracle on the Hudson.

Ms Swetnick, who claims to have multiple clearances, now gets to explain to the FBI/DISCO authorities how multiple episodes of mass criminality by others & her being a rape victim was not mentioned in her interviews for her clearances. Or, was it?

Authorities who handle clearances are not fond of revelations like this out of the blue. It makes them look bad. I expect the downstream effect of this revelation will be that Ms Swetnick will lose her clearances & then her job.

the Reverend Hale is a famed witch expert from a nearby town. Suddenly, in front of Reverend Hale, Abigail changes her story and begins to suggest that Tituba did indeed call on the Devil. Tituba, surprised at this accusation, vehemently denies it. But when Rev. Hale and Rev. Parris interrogate Tituba, she confesses (under pressure) to witchcraft and names several other women as “witches” in the village. While Tituba and Abigail are accusing women in the town, several other young girls, including Mary Warren follow Abigail’s lead and begin accusing other women as well.

I guess if there are several accusers, witchcraft must have been happening.

readering said...As hard to believe as the third accusation might be i feel this column has been overtaken by events. Certainly folks underestimated Avenatti.

9/26/18, 11:40 AM

As with others above I never heard of any group rape stories while in school either. There were occasionally orgy or group sex stories but they were all described as consensual. Even with these stories we all gave them the same level of concern we did to the rumor that the Wilson sisters from Heart were an incestuous lesbian couple. Which is to say 16 year old boys have better sense than left wing (supposed) adults about the likelihood of an organized gang rape ring run by Catholic schoolboys in which Catholic schoolgirls return week after week apparently just praying it won't be their turn - and never filing any complaints.

This ranks right up with Jackie's (of UVA) assertion that frat boys engaged in gang rape as a fraternity initiation ritual.

The latest accuser at bat recites that beach parties had a punch with grain alcohol to get party goers drunk. OK. Than she links that to gang rapes Kavanaugh did not participate in but must have known about.

How can K disprove that semi accusation? He has to say it never happened.

Perhaps the point of these allegations is not to get Kavanaugh to withdraw, but to get the squishy GOP senators to vote Present.

It won't take that many, right? Just one or two?

Which is why we can't let this stand. Not only that, but Feinstein needs to stand in the well of Congress for a public reprimand for actions contributing to the disgrace of the Senate.

There has to be personal consequences for lying and introducing false evidence.

I read that New Yorker story. I was a newspaper copy editor for two decades. I cut my teeth in the newsroom at age 15 in 1975. Any reasonably competent editor would not have published that story without further corroboration. Period, full stop.

Of course, that was when newspapers believed in ethics and could face a libel suit if they got it wrong.

[Kavanaugh and Judge drugged and disabled young girls for sex but they themselves didn't have sex with them? They handed the girls off to other boys?

At multiple parties. The girls came back to the party the next week or so.

To be drugged. Again. And gang raped. Again. By dozens of boys.

But Kavanaugh and Judge just watched? Kavanaugh was there doing something.

Just when you though we had hit rock bottom, a new level has been made.]

Does double spacing make your argument, such as it is, stronger?Schlump and the GOP hit "rock bottom" every day of the week. I've followed the story closely, and listened to his self-serving interview on FOX. His taciturn wife at his side during his denials did nothing for me. As the late Tammy Wynette sang, "Stand by Your Man" through thick and thin. Stay home and bake cookies. The totality of facts and circumstances leads me to believe that Kavanaugh is a goddamn liar. If he admitted to getting drunk, and rowdy at parties while in college, he'd be more credible. I'd still vote against his confirmation because I don't vote for Rethuglicans no matter how squeaky clean he or she appears. The rot goes too deep with that rotten bunch of hypocrites.

Avenatti is going to have to issue the witness supporting material- if he doesn't have that, then this new story won't stop Kavanaugh. The affidavit should have named the witnesses itself- that it didn't is kind of a tell, in my opinion. By the time you give such a document, you have the witnesses in hand if you have any kind of competent attorney.

This still smells like a hoax to me- the sheer lunacy of the story is breath-taking- Avenatti and Swetnick had better have pretty convincing back up from actual witnesses to the activity described- it won't be nearly enough to have people telling us Swetnick told them about this at so and so time- that boat has already sailed.

Speaking of alleged journalists, yesterday Nate Silver published a story that the “least worst” option for Republicans was for Kavanaugh to withdraw.

HELL NO!!!

Force Heitkamp and McCaskill and Manchin and Donnelly and Tester to vote against Kavanaugh and defend their votes a few weeks from now. Give Trump’s “crawl over broken glass” voters a reason to vote for Cruz, McSally, Scott, and Blackburn. Do it.

We have arrived at a strange place where the Democrats now seem intent on destroying their own narrative with absurdity. Perhaps some adult in the Democrat Party finally recognized the danger and decided to derail the whole thing. Perhaps the Clintons realized there's no way this can be good for them in the long run. Expect the next accuser to be even more ridiculous. Probably something in the nature of Satanic pedophilia...

Under the guise of protecting women (from the embarrassment of revealing 36-year old claims), the Left is coming after your husbands and sons and fathers. They are exaggerating past high school hijinx antics and trying to morph them into present claims of rape.

I have no doubt that in high school and college, the mix of alcohol, horny young men, and young women has led to many regrettable, awkward and unpleasant conflicts. Maybe, the worst of the lot would be considered rape.

But don't let these assholes weaponize old charges to slander a good, innocent man.

Speaking of alleged journalists, yesterday Nate Silver published a story that the “least worst” option for Republicans was for Kavanaugh to withdraw.

HELL NO!!!

The Republican faithful don't won't Kavanuagh to withdraw for another reason: they know that the Dems will do the exact same thing to the next nominee. The base doesn't want to reward Democratic bad behavior because they know if the Senate does so, that's what we're going to get from here on out.

@Matthew Sablan: I seriously doubt there will be similar stories about Amy Coney Barrett.

FWIW I think they are crazy stories. That affidavit is about as affidavit-y as a cocktail napkin. But the Republicans have been outflanked. Their mistakes started when they let Democrat Senator guests hijack the hearings by shrieking and yelling. The Republicans did nothing. By doing nothing, they looked weak and uncommitted to the right of the American public to have orderly hearings. Everything the Democrats do, they get blamed for.

That sucks, but the only solution is to get better at politics. Which is their job description.

WWWW said: "Yes. It's not common." Really? You've heard of/about gang-rape parties?My experience is somewhat unique since I didn't live on campus; but I certainly attended numerous parties on campus at other local universities. I never heard of such at the time. That's not to say I haven't heard reference to those kind of things in subsequent years- mostly referring to events involving athletic teams. (Not corroborated, by the way)

Journalism. In the recent commotion about Woodward's book, there was a reminder of his book about John Belushi. Many of Belushi's friends cooperated, gave lengthy interviews etc. They were shocked at how the product was a standard Woodward sausage: he had his story from the beginning, before any facts; "drugs ruined every aspect of Belushi's life." Belushi's friends knew this wasn't true; the drugs were terrible, but a talented wonderful Belushi shone through quite regularly. Woodward twisted all anecdotes, all facts, and managed to get everything wrong. Belushi's friends had a joke: "I'm beginning to think Nixon was innocent."

Now that we have a new Avenatti client allegation, I think I will wait for that post to comment. We have officially jumped the shark. Tomorrow we will learn more about Kavanaugh as his buddies sacrificing babies.

IF, and this is a very big if, there were repeated, weekly parties that involved underage drinking, drug use, and sex, and the same women/girls kept showing up over and over again, then to me that certainly seems to imply they were willing participants.

No woman/girl I have ever known would repeatedly keep going back to get raped again and again.

Any nominee for the 5th SCOTUS vote will be slandered. Alito was hit pretty hard, but nothing like this. Thomas got hit really hard, but stood his ground against 8 year old, vague, bogus allegations by Hill.

To their credit, the Dems (who held the Senate majority) did not filibuster Thomas. In fact, 1 Dem Senator DeConcini from Arizona, voted for Thomas in Committee and later for him on the floor to help him squeak by. 11 Dems (mostly from the South) voted for Thomas.

The Dem party was much more sane back then. But the lesson they learned was to fight harder. Use Alinsky tactics, make personal attacks, use filibuster.

Whereas the GOP easily confirmed Ginsberg, Sotomayor and Breyer without too much psychodrama.

It's weird - when it comes to NewAge cultism, the credibility of the journalists doesn't matter at all. Nobody will care. You can scream at the top of your lungs - even through a NYT journalist for years - and the reaction is "Ho-Hum, check out Tom Cruise's new movie!" Why would anyone who's been through that take the rest of you seriously?

For the record, from what I am hearing the sworn deposition is not actually committing to any actual claims against Kavanaugh. It's all weasel words to make an impression without technically leaving anyone open to lawsuits.

In the summer of 1984, I played strip poker with three classmates - two of them females and one male. We were drinking alcohol, but were nowhere close to black-out drunk. In time, all of us were completely naked. The female classmate seated to my right had beautiful, full breasts and a coal black pubic bush. At one point, she stood up and walked across the room to access the bathroom. What a delightful vision she was. Tragically, that was the first and last time I ever saw her nude. Although she later that night, playfully, sat on my lap, nothing of a carnal nature transpired. However, after the card game broke up, the other two card players wound up fornicating on the houseboat owned by the girl's father. Under the Get Kavanaugh Playbook unveiled in the last two weeks by our friends on the other side of the aisle, both my male friend and I could be "credibly" accused of getting our lady companions in an advanced state of intoxication for the express purpose of raping them (in my friend's case) and molesting them (in my case, vis a vis her sitting nude on my equally bare lap). Curiously, the girl with the awesome rack gave me her bra as a keepsake. That, too, would be "proof" of my guilt. "The white devil seized her clothes and forced her to drive home nude!!!"

“I think I did it all as a young man, but I never attended a party at which there was a gang rape, and I never HEARD of a single such party. Did any of you here? The idea of routine gang rape parties seems preposterous on the face of it, even for Catholics. “

In the world old #me too whingers and their Democrat enablers, not even the preposterous is preposterous. And the real is not real if itponts to K. Ellison, Booker, Biden, Clinton or Menendez or evidence exonerating Kavanaugh. It is also evident that many Yalies learn that the progressive agenda is everything and honor, justice and evidence mean nothing.

If this ruse works, anything will work. Sarah Hoyt is right: lefties are equal parts idiots and evil people.

No. this is merely evil done in the cause of totalitarianism. Today the martyrs are smeared and defamed. Tomorrow they will be shot. Trumpit is an example of the kind of amoral robot who gleefully wears the boot that stamps the human face forever.

The credibility of journalists seems secondary to the credibility of the underlying allegation. Regardless of how the it was reported, the allegation of Dr. Ford has some very glaring credibility issues. The specifics of allegation are very unclear. She can't identify a specific place or a time it occurred, there are no corroborating witnesses. Some of the people she named as corroborating witnesses say they have no memory of anything like she described occurring. This isn't even broaching the subject that Dr. Ford could have political motivations to lie about the issue. All these problems with her allegation would still exist regardless of how it is reported on. If Megan McCardle is hoping for a society where journalists are entirely scrupulous and much more objective it would still be a bad idea to rely on their reporting. One point that should be a part of the #MeToo movement is to treat allegations seriously which should mean examining each case on an individual basis. This must include looking at all the credibility problems of each accusation.

@MatthewSablan: That’s a good point. If she was witnessing gang rapes, wouldn’t she be culpable for continuing to participate in these parties? And if she brought another woman to one of these parties, was she culpable for more?

This was the era of National Lampoon. A lot of guys wanted to be Hunter Thompson, but it doesn’t seem likely that many of them succeeded.

I still wonder how being the running buddy of a journalist who wrote detailed confessions of high school perfidy wasn’t anticipated better by the people who presented Kavanaugh as a snow-driven choirboy.

Some of the most revered figures in the news business have been accused of far worse misconduct than anything attributed to Clarence Thomas. The associates of these newscasters turned a willfully blind eye to the misconduct of these newscasters. The news business has damaged credibility in reporting on sex cases. Hollywood, the Catholic Church, broadcast journalists--they have no standing when it comes to passing judgment on sexual misconduct.

I think the Commie-pinko lefties have their 2020 candidate - the one, the only, Michael Avenatti. He holds all the qualifications.

To wit:> While in college and later in law school, Avenatti worked at The Research Group, a political opposition research and media firm run by Rahm Emanuel.

> In 2013 Avenatti formed a company, Global Baristas, to buy Seattle-based Tully's Coffee out of bankruptcy. Since 2015, Global Baristas has been named in more than 50 lawsuits in state and federal courts for breach of contract, unpaid bills, and unpaid taxes.

> In 2017, a Florida man named Gerald Tobin alleged Avenatti failed to pay him $28,700 for private investigatory work. As a result, Avenatti's firm was abruptly forced into bankruptcy

> In 2018, Avenatti's law firm was subjected to a $10 million judgment in U.S. bankruptcy court.[47] Avenatti has also defaulted on a $440,000 judgment in back taxes, penalties, and interest that he was personally obligated to pay under another bankruptcy settlement.

> Avenatti has on several occasions, including in a post to Twitter, expressed interest in running for president in 2020.[50] In a CBC TV interview published in September 2018, Avenatti said he would run in 2020 only against Trump or Pence. (Source for all of the above: Wiki)

You have to imagine literally hundreds of people who knew Kavanaugh and Judge during the period of 1980-1983 have been interviewed by both the FBI in the 6 background checks and by journalists in just the last 2 weeks. Did none of them know about Kavanaugh and Judge's rape gangs that Swetnick claims had boys lined up in the hallways of multiple parties to participate in? This seems so improbable as to be bordering on impossible. I am still waiting to hear from the witnesses that Swetnick claims exists- if her affidavit has been forwarded to the judiciary committee, then the witnesses should have been identified within the packet somewhere. I am beginning to think it is just a bluff by Swetnick and Avenatti- surely if they had the corroboration, nothing is gained by withholding it, right? Withholding it undermines the claim almost from the start.

She can't identify a specific place or a time it occurred, there are no corroborating witnesses. Some of the people she named as corroborating witnesses say they have no memory of anything like she described occurring.

Her inability to remember the location has a bigger hole now than it did when first presented. She now claims to remember everyone at the "party". In addition to Kavanaugh and Judge the particpants include "PJ" (male) and the ex wife of Democrat media member Bob Beckel (forget her name offhand).

She knows everyone there but can't remember whose home it is? Why not figure it out?

The party had to be at one of the participant's homes. We know it wasn't at Ford's house so there's a grand total of 4 homes to check out. Why aren't the people who profess to be interested in truth showing her a lineup of the homes (mixed in with unrelated homes as all lineups should be)?

People understand the Frat = rapey assertion is propaganda. Similarly people keep sending their daughters to college even though 1 in 5 women are notoriously sexually assaulted during their time on campus. People understand reality no matter how much the left is willing to live their own lives in FantasyLand.

Blogger Inga...Allie Oop said... “I was a virgin for many years” Kavinaugh’s past seems to be catching up with him. I guess what happened at Georgetown Prep didn’t stay at Georgetown Prep after all.--Inga swallows!

this entire thing is one of history's biggest bluffs. IT's built on a foundation of quicksand. You can't use one uncorroborated and politically motivated accusation to corroborate another just like it.

there's no fucking evidence that kavanaugh did any of the things he's accused of doing. the me too movement also depends on the credibility of the accusers and the strength of the supporting evidence, and it will go down in flames if it is repeatedly that the only evidence is the accusation itself.

As I read this, I'm thinking of Janet Malcolm and The Journalist and the Murderer. There's some irony here for the women who are talking to the press, as Malcolm emerges as a chronicler of this particular story.

As Malcolm so well knows, the story the journalist writes may not be the story the women want to tell, or even if it is mostly, may, when read in cold black print on a cold screen, will leave them looking perhaps like fools, or harboring a not so honorable agenda.

"...The first accusation inspired credulity because of the built-up strength of the believe-all-survivors ETHIC" (caps are mine). That's a total BS premise all by itself - "believe all survivors" is NOT an "ethic", it's a dysfunction. Something akin to the idea of a Journalist opining on the credulity of other Journalists. McCardle now becomes just another hack writing morality lessons for her less insightfully moral readers.

The third set of allegations sounds like a woman's idea of how a gang rape takes place, but not like they actually do. I don't thinks girls would continue to attend parties where gang rapes take place or that such a thing could remain even remotely secret. They would have dozens of witnesses who would remember and corroborate. Or you can believe Michael Creepavanti, and the integrity-challenged people he seems to gravitate to.

Swetnick's charges will ring true with the far-lefty base because that's the way they think people like Kavanaugh are...all of them. "Well, of course K and company brutalized women in the more horrific ways -- they're Republicans, aren't they...?!"

I am beginning to think it is just a bluff by Swetnick and Avenatti- surely if they had the corroboration, nothing is gained by withholding it, right? Withholding it undermines the claim almost from the start.

How did he get her to sign an affidavit? She is now at risk for perjury. Of course the DSA members in DC know they will never be prosecuted.

1. Rape is a terrible crime.2. To falsely accuse someone of rape is also a terrible crime.

But point #2 is not quite right, is it? Even when the false accuser confesses or is proved way past the reasonable doubt stage to the “only a moron or a Democrat could possibly believe that crap” stage, it is rare that anything bad happens to her. Maybe some community service or a little probation. It’s all wink-wink, nudge-nudge and “girls sometimes exaggerate a little.”

No matter how this turns out, the Supreme Court as an institution will suffer harm that will take decades to repair, and that could have been avoided if Ford's letter had been turned over to the Judiciary Committee last Jult, when Feinstein received it. As it is, it is impossible to arrive at even a rough consensus whether the process was fair, let alone whether the accusations are true. Feinstein or who ever is responsible for this outrage has a lot to answer for.

State v. Owen, 1 Neb. App. 1060, 510 N.W.2d 503 (1993). In that case the defendant alleged she went to sex and drug parties with prominent Omaha people. She testified under oath that the Omaha police chief had afternoon sex with her in area motels. And that he used his gun in a sexual manner. She further testified that he had no surgical marks on his body.

At trial it was proved that he had significant scars on his arm from a gunshot injury and that he never carried a gun on the job.

Convicted for perjury.

The affidavit is general rather than specific so therefore it is harder to pin a perjury rap on Swetnick. Creep Porn Lawyer knows that.

bagoh20 said...The third set of allegations sounds like a [Title IX cultist's] idea of how a gang rape takes place,

Jackie from UVA was also undone by her immersion in the sexual assault apparatus on American campuses. Since they exclude reasonable people there was no one to explain how crazy their stories sounded as they escalated trying to one-up each others' horror stories. But then those stories transition from their controlled environment where no one is allowed to suggest asking hundreds of men to commit brutal rapes without a single one declining and reporting just isn't remotely plausible except to the insane.

It's amazing how closely the obvious failures in the two stories track each other.

In general, I oppose the ownership of guns, but from what I'm reading lately women need to pack a piece to blow away these rapists at parties. Kavanaugh is lucky to be alive, so is Clarence Thomas, and Cosby. Join the gun club girls.

I think McArdle is being optimistic here. The Media is no longer a factor.

I'm aware of the stuff going on in Washington, so is Ms Althouse. Likely many people here. I would like you to ask your circle of acquaintances and people you see if they are. I did that the other day and no one knew anything about it.

How many people do you know who watch CNN or the news channels, who read newspapers? 1 in 30? Who read the Washington Post? 1 in 20,000?

It doesn't matter what the Media says. The delay by Republicans is to see if what Trump is telling them is true; the Media isn't worth listening to, they represent no one rational, and will have no effect on voters.

Anyone with a bit of interest will turn things on for a couple minutes and find rampant speculation and a prurient focus on the private lives of people. Then turn it off.

"She was so distressed by this that she did fuck-all about it, and evidently continued attending those parties. So she can fuck off and get bent.

Yes. I mean who doesn't report gang rape? That is some serious evil not reporting gang rape when it happens. She claims all sorts of guys gang raped all sorts of girls weekend after weekend. Like a conveyor belt. Nobody ever said a thing. Then they returned for more next weekend. Amazing.

Rasor says that Judge “told her ashamedly” about an incident in which he and other boys took turns having sex with a drunk woman, per The New Yorker. He seemed to think it was consensual, she added, and he didn’t name anyone else who had been involved. There is no indication that Kavanaugh was one of the boys, The New Yorker notes.

But that story may also be not true and there's nothing that coinnects it to Geoergetown Prep or Kavanaugh.

Its publication seems to be have been tied in to this allegation.

An hour after the report was published, attorney Michael Avenatti tweeted an email in which he claimed to have “significant evidence” that Kavanaugh, Judge, and others would “participate in the targeting of women with alcohol/drugs in order to allow a ‘train’ of men to subsequently gang rape them.”

Pizzagate II.

Still, Judge was an alcoholic and wrote a book about it,

https://www.amazon.com/Wasted-Tales-Mark-Gauvreau-Judge/dp/1568381425

And Brett Kavanaugh did engage in some drinking (although he never had an alcoholic blackout he says)

And he pledged to a fraternity, (DKE) and maybe also a secret society (Truth and Courage aka as TNC and aka as something else) at Yale which were very contemptuous of women - or maybe not.

The fraternity as well as the secret society were eventually disbanded several decades later although the franernity was revived.

If true, there will be many more people coming forth. I once talked to an archaeologist who said that lefties would plant artifacts to stop projects, but real artifacts come from an environment of stuff that is impossible to fake.

To save abortion many women (and men) are cheering on other women making unsubstantiated accusations about rape.

Meanwhile, such unsubstantiated accusations will likely result in actual rape victims proceeding forward in a society where many will now be looking at such charges with increasing suspicion and cynicism.

So: access to no-limitations abortion is more important than women having a harder time getting justice in future sexual crimes.

Charles Bronson just talked to me from the Great Hereafter: he says y'all fucked up.

Michael K said: "Remember that the Bush TANG allegations were uncovered as a fraud by a blog reader, not the news media."

So was the infamous "fauxtography" scandal. That scandal concerned Reuters publishing photos of the Lebanon War that had been deliberately Photoshopped to make Israel's bombing campaign look more indiscriminate than it was.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adnan_Hajj_photographs_controversy

That was ten times worse than the New Yorker story about Ramirez and Kavanaugh. The New Yorker is guilty of negligence (didn't bother to check sources well enough), but Reuters was guilty of deliberate fakery.